Concord Music Group is very pleased to announce that a definitive agreement has been reached with Wood Creek Capital Management LLC to purchase Concord from Village Roadshow Entertainment Group. The acquisition is being made on behalf of funds which Wood Creek advises, and an individual investor group that includes members of Concord’s senior management and industry veterans Steve Smith and Scott Pascucci. The transaction is expected to close within a few days.

Didn’t even know there was a deal in the works. I guess it is good news?

This isn’t a ‘4 steps to beating piracy guide’, but we might as well start at the beginning. Prepare a game plan for your music. Figure out what path you want to take with your music and then stick to it. Do you want to get your music out in the world trying to get the most people to hear it, or do you need to make a monetary return on your recording investment? If you need to make a return, don’t give away your music for free, expecting some people to pay or donate. If your goal is awareness and popularity, then giving away a bunch of songs or the entire album may be the way to go.

Interesting. I had a discussion with a bass player about things like Spotify and Pandora. He was all “they pay you” and I was “like .000001 cents per play”. I think the way to go is to either put it into iTunes, or perhaps do what some people are doing and make it a “pay what you want” thing.

UPDATE – Actually, the rate is $0.21 per 100 streams of a song. And Pandora supposedly pays $0.12 per 100 streams.

Digital Audio insider had an article up about Renting and Owning music. I wrote some comments on the site that basically say no, I don’t see it happening. People have been saying this since Napster was out. Heck, Rhapsody has been offering this for a long time…..streaming music. Pandora has been doing it for a few years. And now everyone is excited that Spotify (what a stupid name….as stupid as FaceBook…ugh) is in the US. Renting your music just has never taken off.

I certainly don’t see it happening now that AT&T, and Verizon have capped data usage on mobile devices. Oh, but the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile will fix that right (Bullshit!). And they all now cap your internet usage at home (Time-Warner & U-Verse is capped at 250 gigs a month and so are others). So….that is another hurdle for streaming to contend with.

Basically, I like free things that let me FIND music I like. Like Pandora or a PodCast. I LOVE PodCasts. Single best way to find new albums or even hear great things for free.

Then I will buy that song for $0.99 and own it. No re-occuring monthly fee. It’s mine.

Earlier in the week, Hypebot pointed to this eMarketer summary of two recent studies about consumer attitudes about owning music vs. renting it:

The first of the two studies was a survey conduced by Insight Research Group on behalf of eMusic that revealed the widely noted insight that 91% of those polled preferred to own music rather than subscribing to it.

There are real differences, both logistical and psychological, between owning and renting music. But I’ll bet that the preference for ownership will decrease as the listening experience for “owned” and “rented” music converges. If you’re using a website or app to listen to music on your computer or portable device, where the files are coming — your hard drive, your cloud drive, or the server of a music subscription service — doesn’t have much effect on your listening experience. And a year from now, even more people will be using Spotify, iTunes Match, Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google Music, and other services to listen to music. The more they do, the more willing they’ll be to forgo actual ownership.